Troubles for the Kubuntu project: a number of Kubuntu developers are complaining that Canonical is not answering their requests. They state: "We all from the kubuntu.de-team have pursued this aim [to improve Kubuntu] together, but most of the work has been done by Andreas Mueller (amu). He is not only co-founder and unpayed developer of the Kubuntu-project, but he's also hosting this website and he's taking over all the arising expenses. During our endeavours for Kubuntu, there were made several requests to Canonical. All those requests are unanswered 'till today! Up to now, there is only one payed developer. Since Canonical ignores all our personal and partly financial engagement until now we have to assume that Canonical is not willing to make Kubuntu a '1st class distribution'."

"indeed. the reason gnome exists is because KDE depended upon a non-gpl license in Qt. now Qt is GPL, KDE is LGPL or BSD - so problem gone. bye Gnome..."

It's nowhere near that simple. I personally couldn't care less about GPL/BSD or whatever. Gnome suits my computing needs much better than KDE; it's simple, attractive, and very user-friendly. I'm not a developer, I'm a so-called "power user" and KDE is just way too cluttered for me. I see no need in three text editors, eight or so mp3 players and so on. One good application for each purpose is all I need. BUT, just because that's all I need doesn't mean I want KDE to go away. In fact, even though I'll personally never use it I hope it stays in active development for a long time to come. Why? Because it is the desktop of choice for so many great developers, including Linus Torvalds and Patrick Volkerding.

Gnome may have started as a fully free alternative to KDE back in the day, but it has long since grown beyond that and has a much different reason for being now.

So, please, before you post such inflammatory comments you may want to consider that your point of view is not the only one in the world. Keep in mind that the most popular and widespread Linux distro (Ubuntu) chooses Gnome as its default desktop. There has to be a reason for that, don't you think?